What are the keywords of advice you would share with anyone who needs to accelerate the introduction, adoption, and profitability of digital content and products globally in 2018? While I have been asked this question several times for the last couple of months, my answer has been very similar regardless of industry and background. Think about investing in meeting the level of authenticity and empathy that your local customers require!

Social Pulse

"Despacito," Luis Fonsi's and Daddy Yankee's smash single, served as an important reminder of the booming cultural prominence of Latinos in the U.S. The song, with a 16-week run at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, tied the record for the longest run in the number one spot. This is especially significant since the lyrics are mostly in Spanish (note that the original version of the song, as opposed to the chart-topping version that is a remix, is entirely in Spanish). This continuing cultural prominence can be felt everywhere, and it extends beyond music.

Data is all the rage in marketing and media. It would be quite difficult to find a single marketing or media-related conference this year that doesn't offer at least one panel in its program on data, and most of them feature two or more. Deterministic data (i.e., data that can be matched to a unique and identifiable individual, such as a name or an email address) is being touted as an untapped precious resource. But in this discussion regarding data, many marketers and media companies are missing the opportunities offered by social media data.

In 1999, I joined the New York Office of the State Attorney General as a research associate. While I had access to premium databases, such as LexisNexis, I conducted much of my research via the nascent internet. Later, in 2001, I brought my research expertise to the world of marketing services. I designed a course and trained my colleagues across the U.S. in conducting research on the internet. The fundamentals I used then are the same ones that guide my online investigations now.

For the past several years, in addition to working professionally with commercial enterprise data, I have been the self-designated genealogist in my family. I have learned that there is simply no substitute for first-party data. This truism applies, of course, to my professional and personal work with data.

Data has emerged as a key player in the marketing and media sphere. There isn't a single member of the six biggest media corporations in the U.S. or the big five global ad agencies that hasn't made data an integral part of its sales pitch to the marketplace. However, there remains some confusion regarding what exactly is meant by "data" and why it's so valuable. As a result of this lack of clarity, I will address what we mean when we talk about it, as well as why it's so valuable for media and marketing companies.

At the end of last year, Laura Martin, senior analyst for entertainment, cable, and media at Needham and Co., LLC, authored a very interesting report on the future of TV. The report focuses on the continuously fragmenting video content landscape, which has made it increasingly more difficult for media companies to sustain the same level of profit per hour of content. In a world in which consumers' media attention is split among linear TV, digital subscription-based platforms, and digital ad-based platforms, media companies are faced with the increasingly difficult challenge of maximizing profits.

The automated buying and selling of media inventory ("programmatic media") is creating a revolution in advertising. From 2013 to 2015, according to eMarketer estimates, programmatic ad spending in digital display has skyrocketed from about a quarter (24%) of the total digital display ad spend in the U.S. to slightly more than half (55%). From 2013 to 2015 (also according to eMarketer), programmatic digital video ad spending in the U.S. has risen from just 5% in 2013 to 28% in 2015, and it is expected to hit 40% in 2016.

Frequently, my colleagues are surprised by my reluctance to join in the fanfare around emerging social media apps. They know me not only as a social media enthusiast, but also as someone who has spent much of the last several years helping advertisers leverage social media to grow their brands. As a result, I'm often confronted with looks of disappointment when I do not share in the market's enthusiasm about the newest apps. Just because I might enjoy the latest app to hit the market, doesn't mean it's ready to be included in a serious marketing plan.

In 2014, one of the biggest stories in social media was its emergence as a major driver of website traffic. At the beginning of the year, BuzzFeed began reporting to the press that 75% of its site traffic was coming from social media, and it didn't take long for others to begin touting their numbers. In reality, this trend began around August 2013 when many digital publishers noticed that social media had become a significant source of traffic. Up until that time, the conventional wisdom was that social media platforms were ill-suited for generating digital conversions. However, it is now clear that--harnessed effectively--social media can even surpass search as the main external referrer to the website.

As social media professionals, we often like to imagine ourselves as iconoclast pioneers. To a large extent, 2014 has decisively disabused us of that illusion. We now have more than a decade of rigorous research by major think tanks that leads us to the same inevitable conclusion: On social media, the same basic rules of mass media still apply-very little ever goes viral, and the best way to achieve mass awareness and adoption is by securing the broadest possible reach. At the same time, the continuing evolution of the major social networking platforms is making it increasingly difficult to achieve mass reach solely through purely organic and earned media strategies.

For the two networks airing the tournament, Univision and ESPN, the matches are setting viewership records. The networks netted a combined average of 7.5 million viewers during the first 11 matches. During the opening match of the tournament, the two networks drew a larger average audience than any World Cup opener in the past 20 years. For the match between the U.S. and Ghana, the average audience across both networks was the second largest for a U.S. opening-round match in history. The largest was in 2010, but that match was aired on a Saturday on ABC, whereas this time it was on a Monday and in English on ESPN.

Prognosticating is always a risky endeavor. It's even more precarious in social media. Any prediction about the future must rely on the available evidence, which is usually historical data. In an area such as social media-in which the dynamics are constantly changing and the players come and go like the changing tides-historical data is often only useful for short-term forecasting. As such, this column is an attempt to tread the fine line between obvious platitude and wild prophesy. The following are my top three predictions for social media in 2014.

In August, the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project released data from its spring tracking survey showing that while there are clearly fewer Hispanic Americans among the total U.S. internet population, these same users are more likely to use social networking sites than non-Hispanics. While 70% of white, non-Hispanic internet users use social networking sites, a whopping 80% of Hispanic internet users use such sites (75% of black, non-Hispanic internet users use social networking sites). In addition, while just 14% of white, non-Hispanic internet users use Twitter, 28% of Hispanic internet users employ the service (27% of black, non-Hispanic internet users use Twitter).

Last month, Nielsen released the "Nielsen Twitter TV Rating" which promises to provide a standard measure for TV show performance in social media. The rating system uses real-time data from Twitter, in tandem with the robust classification system from SocialGuide to measure the actual reach of the TV-related conversations happening during the airing of shows. The system does have some challenges before it. At present it is not yet able to accurately track Spanish-language networks. However, the company is currently working on rolling this out before the end of the year. What may prove to be the most challenging is that it only considers Twitter activity.

Facebook had a rough start on the stock market, due-in part-to its monetization strategy (or perceived lack thereof). In mid-June of this year, a year after the Facebook initial public offering (IPO), Wall Street got bullish once again when it came to Facebook. The reason is simple. After years of struggling to devise a business model that pleases advertisers and the all-important users, the company has introduced a strategy for monetizing the dynamic social interactions that occur at the heart of the platform-in the newsfeed (this is something I urged the company to do in a piece published in MediaPost back in 2010).

Last month, the Census Bureau released data showing that 38 million Americans speak Spanish at home. This finding places the U.S. fifth on a list of countries by number of Spanish-speakers. Even more interesting among the Census Bureau's findings was that most Americans who speak Spanish at home also report speaking English "very well" (as identified by the findings). Perhaps the most striking among the findings was that 3 million non-Hispanic people reported speaking Spanish at home. The reality reflected in these findings is that Spanish continues to be an integral part of the national fabric.

Last month, the 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup Final between Brazil and Spain, aired simultaneously on Univision and ESPN, providing a stark reminder of how important Hispanic Americans are to the continuing growth of soccer in the U.S. While viewership was down 45% for ESPN from the 2009 FIFA Confederations Cup Final, viewership for Univision was up 34%. Univision viewership during the match soared to 4 million.

Last fall, I wrote a column about the growing importance of U.S. Hispanics for marketers. In it, I presented a few data points that highlighted the propensity of Hispanic Americans toward social media behaviors. Since then, there has been a deluge of additional evidence that U.S. Hispanics continue to lead the charge in social media adoption.

In the past month I have attended two webinars with thought-leaders from the social media marketing space in which one of the luminaries referred to Likes on Facebook as "vanity metrics" as if this were uncontestable common knowledge. This was troubling for three reasons. First, it reveals engrained prejudices about social media that are simply false. Second, it suggests a profound ignorance about the mechanics of social media platforms. Third, it indicates that direct-response thinking still dominates much of the discourse around social media marketing.

The purpose of brand marketing is to generate sales. Whether we specialize in traditional or digital media--whether our focus is paid advertising or earned publicity--the sole reason for our existence is to get consumers to buy. Yet this idea gives us pause. We tend to associate immediate sales impact with ephemeral price promotions that we know produce short-lived sales bursts and precious little in the way of true brand growth. We know from decades of research that price promotions function essentially as giveaways to existing customers and play a very minor role in the acquisition of new customers. Meanwhile, given the nature of brand marketing, we're rarely able to demonstrate the full impact our efforts have.

Social TV is making headlines as broadcasters endeavor to monetize their audiences whose attention is now spread simultaneously across multiple platforms. It is now common knowledge that most TV viewers, while watching their favorite shows, are actively engaged in social media conversations about the shows. Broadcasters have largely seen this phenomenon as an opportunity to grow the audience of their TV programs and accompanying websites, thereby increasing the value of those properties. However many broadcasters have been seeking ways to harness their social media audiences to create new incremental revenue streams. This may sound futuristic but, in many ways, the emerging business model actually harkens back to the earliest days of broadcast media.

The controversy concerning online brand marketing has returned to the pages of the digital marketing trades once again, as industry insiders and pundits are weighing in on the latest iterations of the old debates regarding banners, clicks, emerging formats like "native ads", and the viability of brand marketing online in general. It's time to take a break to consider the most current data.

During the past couple of years increasing numbers of commentators form the academic and commercial sectors have begun to realize that social media is mass media. This has been less a recognition of the mass adoption of social media technology than a deeper understanding of the way in which social media technology has come to function in society. Initially it appeared that the advent of social media would inaugurate a new media paradigm - one in which users would dominate while corporations and other commercial interests, whose absolute control characterized hitherto existing mass media, would be relegated to a subordinate role.

This past November, auditory neuroscientist Seth S. Horowitz began his brilliant New York Times opinion piece, "The Science and Art of Listening," by asking the reader, "What do you hear right now?" By simply listening, one suddenly becomes aware of an entire universe of information that only seconds before did not exist. Most of this information may have no other value than the purely aesthetic, but some of it may provide clues to novel, powerful perspectives on one's environment.

Embedded vision technology, while still in its early stages, has seen significant advances recently. Many of these advances offer the prospect of radically transforming the way that people interact with their environments. Part of this transformation will result from the radical expansion of consumers' simultaneous access to information that embedded vision technology will enable. Embedded vision technology will allow unprecedented instantaneous access to information that will assist consumers as they go about their daily lives. Inherent in this concurrent, continuous access to relevant information will be enhanced visibility of the daily activities of individual consumers to corporations and even governments. The implications of this impending dynamic are as formidable for the marketer as they are potentially menacing for the private individual.

The explosion of digital media launched after the first internet bubble burst ten years ago has given rise to a vast and intricate landscape of technologies each promising to simplify the increasingly complex and fragmented tasks involved in digital marketing. The number of companies in this space is staggering. LUMA Partners has famously mapped technology vendor markets for display, mobile, search, social, and video. Forbes contributor Feinleib recently traced a map of the Big Data market.

Beginning in 2009 with the massive election protests in Iran, media pundits in the West began heralding a new era of political activism in which young pro-democracy advocates harnessed the power of social media to organize spontaneously to overthrow their oppressors. Aided by western journalists, the term "Twitter Revolution" entered the popular lexicon to refer to the mass demonstrations and uprisings in Iran, Tunisia and Egypt during the period from 2009-2011. In his celebratory piece, "The Revolution Will Be Twittered", the prominent British political commentator Andrew Sullivan declared, "You cannot stop people any longer ... They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before."

There are currently over 50 million Hispanic people in the U.S. This means that the Hispanic population of the U.S. is greater than the entire population of Spain, which makes the U.S. home to the second largest Hispanic population in the world, second only to Mexico. Furthermore, the Hispanic population is growing despite the precipitous decline in immigration from Hispanic countries since the Great Recession. Currently comprising about 17% of the U.S. population, Hispanic people will constitute between 26-29% of the U.S. population by 2050.

Social TV is on fire. Social media behaviors related to prime time TV viewing surged 194% between April 2011 and the same month this year according to recent data from Trendrr, the social-media monitoring firm. Yet Social TV is not entirely new. The phenomenon first emerged a little over two years ago when hashtag usage reached critical mass on Twitter and the company introduced "Trending Topics" on its front page.

Branded entertainment is back with a vengeance. Companies across multiple consumer verticals have been creating engaging long-form digital video content and harnessing the power of social media on PCs and mobile devices to engage consumers and reach mass audiences. Some examples of the current trend from this past Summer alone include campaigns from Ford ("Random Acts of Fusion") Intel and Toshiba ("The Beauty Inside"), Subway ("The 4 to 9ers" and IKEA ("Easy to Assemble"). Moreover it's becoming clear that these aren't one-time efforts. IKEA, for example, has reported that it currently dedicates 2% to 3% of its global marketing budget on branded entertainment and a former Procter & Gamble executive reported to The Wall Street Journal that the brand-marketing giant is now spending 5% of its marketing budget in this area.

If you look at the most successful marketing endeavors brought to life, I would place a big bet that they all started with a creative brief. In case you are not familiar with a creative brief, it is a document produced to help develop creative deliverables such as advertising, websites, visual design, copy, and other marketing outputs. The creative brief consists of a series of simple questions and the answers help the Creative Team generate concepts, ideas, and bring them to life.

The other day, a former colleague was walking me through the introductory Power Point slides he uses to pitch his firm's social media marketing services and the first slide read something like "social media is content, technology and eyeballs." Naturally I balked at such an assertion. What about communities and social networks? "Content, technology and eyeballs" actually describes all visual communications media - from print to TV to digital. It doesn't explain what makes social media so different from other communications media or why it's especially challenging to harness for brand marketing objectives.

Once again "Big Data" is all the rage as enterprises struggle to cope with the data deluge that is exploding across the globe. To provide an illustration of this phenomenon, consider first that, according to Google's Eric Schmidt, there were five exabytes of data created between the dawn of civilization and 2003 (one exabyte is equivalent to one million terabytes). Now consider that, according to Cisco, by 2016 global IP traffic will reach 109.5 exabytes per month. Companies, organizations, and governments are all drowning in data and the bulk of what's contributing to this raging flood is user-generated content.

If there is one thing we are used to from Facebook -- or, at least, are used to complaining about -- it is change. The company has a history of introducing new features at will and then abandoning them. Going forward, though, Facebook's willy-nilly changes may be frowned upon as investors from Friday's IPO start putting in their two cents. When the closing bell rang on Friday, Facebook raised about $16 billion, was valued at short of $105 billion. But investors are not the only ones taking on risk; marketers that think Facebook is the Holy Grail also gamble with company money.

In the past month, online brand marketing has become the subject of a lively debate in the marketing trades, specifically AdExchanger and Advertising Age. Impatient with the slow growth of brand advertising online as well as the persistent absence of a validated method for measuring return on social media marketing investments, marketing services experts are openly questioning the viability of online media as a brand marketing channel.

Do you ever really stop to think about what it means to drive a successful marketing program? Actually, it is pretty simple. If you can change behavior and produce quantifiable results, you have nailed it. But what does this actually mean?

Not infrequently I've found myself in the following situation: I'm at a large PR agency pitching the services of my team of social media specialists to an account director. When we come to the topic of earned media, I tell the account director how we would earn consumer-generated media coverage by identifying influencers, reaching out to them in a spirit of collaboration and persuading them to carry our branded content and messaging. It's at this point that the account director gently interrupts me and says, "Oh, you mean pitching bloggers? We already do that."

I don't have to tell you how the word "expert" is just a tad over used. You are probably cynical about social media experts without any help from me, but putting the snarky comments and jabs aside, let's talk about this seriously as I have some important points of considerations for you.An expert is someone that has mastered a topic and/or specialty. So while the world of social media continues to evolve, how can one accomplish mastery of something that isn't done evolving?

The most commonly held belief about influence is that it is equivalent to the number of a user's friends. Klout, for example, measures influence using three different sets of metrics but the underlying assumption of all of them is a direct correlation between influence and number of fans. The problem with this model is that it may not be correct.

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege to address a number of CEOs and senior executives at a weekend retreat (The Executive Forum) at IBM's Armonk, NY campus. I shared with them "The State of Social Media," but the presentation could have easily been titled, "What Senior Executives Should Know About Social Media." Clearly, the latter was my intent.

Marketers are increasingly aware of the crucial differences between social media and the media technologies that preceded it. Yet, many marketers still have not realized that Marshall McLuhan's famous declaration, "the medium is the message," applies just as much to social media as it did to earlier media technologies. Despite the growing awareness of most marketers, there are some who continue to view social media as simply another vehicle for delivering marketing messages, no different from print or television. However, there are important differences between social media and all previous forms of media technology and-as McLuhan's famous statement suggests- these differences have profound implications for marketers.

When social media first came onto the scene, many people said, "Oh, it's just a passing fad - the soup du jour." Now, though, just about everyone is on the bandwagon, but that doesn't mean people really understand social media marketing and how to go about it. Social media can be simplified and demystified by looking back at some traditional approaches to marketing.